The programme has certainly introduced me to some new tools that I’m looking forward to trying out when the appropriate opportunity arises, and has given me some useful areas to focus on for my professional development.

This year I’ve achieved a few things career-wise, both in work and in my own time:

• Registered, and started collecting evidence, for CILIP Chartership
• Been involved in various projects at work which have given me the opportunity to gain more professional-level experience
• Completed the City & Guilds qualification in Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector – I did this mainly as one of my Chartership goals. However, it was really useful for getting an introduction to teaching generally so I would recommend something like this to those who have no experience in this area.

Next year I hope to achieve:

• Complete CPD23 – this should have been included in achievements for 2011 but I got so behind that I’ve still got a few things left!
• Manage my time and commitments better – see CPD23 above!
• Get a professional post – easier said than done but I’m hoping that this will be the year that something turns up!
• Submit Chartership application – hopefully by the end of the summer
• Attend more LIS events –applying for sponsored places where possible

Hopefully 2012 will be a good year.

Jing also looks interesting as we don’t use this type of tool for creating any help materials at the University library where I work at the moment. However, as my job doesn’t get me directly involved in this type of thing it’s something I’ll need to spend more time figuring out so I can come up with some useful content.

As I’m way behind on CPD23 as it is and trying to catch up I think I’ll leave Prezi and Jing on my list of things to try out and explore in more depth later.

There were speakers from across the sector – NHS, public, HE, and FE – who are doing really innovative work to improve and develop their library services, adapting to new ways of working when faced with the challenges of the current economic situation. Two of the key messages that stood out were the need for library services to develop strong working partnerships and to manage expectations.

Partnerships

Rachel Steele from Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust spoke about a pilot project to develop to role of the clinical librarian. A clinical librarian develops strong links with medical practitioners to inform evidence based practice. They assist in keeping practitioners’ knowledge up to date by conducting literature searches and critical appraisal of health research. This role involves accompanying practitioners when they see patients so the librarian can source relevant research to inform the treatment of those patients.

Mark Freeman and Kathryn Armstrong talked about the Tyne2Seine2 project that they have been involved with for South Tyneside Libraries. This was an international reading project to introduce children to modern European languages. It involved forging strong partnerships between South Tyneside council staff, libraries, and schools and developing links with their counterparts in the twin town of Epinay-sur-Seine in France. They also worked with authors from both countries and even with colleagues from North Tyneside! This project has been very successful in developing the language skills of both English and French schoolchildren and of the adults involved. Most importantly it has demonstrated the value of libraries in reading and in education.

Sharon Reeve from Newcastle City Libraries spoke about services for visually impaired users. Development of this service has relied upon strong partnerships with a range of groups, including service users and external bodies. Newcastle City Libraries were part of the NEALIS (North East Accessible Library and Information Services) project, which was nominated for the 2011 Libraries Change Lives award. This project brought together 12 public library authorities from the North East of England to develop library and information services for people with visual impairments, working in partnership with the RNIB (Royal National Institute of Blind People). Sharon also described the Reading Buddies scheme for providing one-to-one assistance for visually impaired library users from Duke of Edinburgh Award participants, which is another strong partnership for the library service.

Managing Expectations

Speakers from the education sector – FE and HE – highlighted the importance for academic libraries of measuring student satisfaction with and expectations of library services in order to develop and make improvements to services. Dilys Young and Christine Willoughby from Northumbria University described how the University Library uses National Student Survey (NSS) data and other feedback for targeted service development, for example improving resource provision in subject areas where NSS scores are lower, thus responding to student needs and rising expectations. Middlesbrough College learning resources service also use feedback and survey data to determine student expectations. Claire Donlan, Tracey Totty, and James Wells described how this information has highlighted that their students’ expectations of a technology enabled library service. In the current economic climate it is not always possible to spend on all the latest technology and where they have done so they have invested wisely. They also emphasised the importance of “doing more with less” (a phrase familiar to most of us these days) by making the most of existing resources and investigating the plethora of free online resources available. I will certainly be investigating some of the free online tools they mentioned. Just as soon as I finish CPD23…

In his summing up of the day, Colin Raistrick (Chair of NE CILIP) said that the day had proved that the situation is far from bleak. It’s inspiring hear about a range of innovative developments in library services especially when they’re happening in your area of the country.

I work in an academic library so I would say a part of my role is to promote the library across the University – both through involvement in enrolment events and open days and through engaging with staff in other departments. I see this more as marketing and promotion rather than advocacy. Perhaps I’m getting tangled up in semantics… When reading some of the blog posts and comments about this thing I noticed a few people suggested that by providing a good service to library users we are advocating. Surely that’s just doing my job… However, if this means students will tell their friends about the good service they’ve had from the library perhaps we are gaining advocates for the library in our users.

I really do think that the best advocates for a library service (public, academic, or otherwise) are its users.  And maybe that’s why I’m not the greatest advocate for public libraries. I only use them occasionally (and never used them for years before I started my MA) so I feel a bit hypocritical waxing lyrical about the benefits of a service I make little use of myself.

Anyway, onto Thing 15 about events and conferences. I haven’t a lot to write on this one really as so far my experience has been rather limited. I’ve never spoken at an event. At the moment I don’t feel as though I’ve done enough to make a valuable contribution, though I would like to give it a go one day. I’m in awe of all those new professionals who do speak at events and find it inspiring that others can – though it is also a little intimidating and this is perhaps the source of my reticence. I’ve also never organised an event – although I’m good at organising myself I’m not so sure I’d manage to organise others. I’ve only quite recently joined the CDG NE committee so I may have more opportunities to get involved with organising events in the future.

I do have some experience of attending events, however. I really enjoy going to events to learn new stuff, meet new people and generally come away feeling inspired and full of new ideas – all good.  I’ve been fairly lucky in getting support from my employer to attend a couple of events (including the 2010 New Professionals Conference) but mainly I’ve attended free events – including the Toon(lib)TeachMeet earlier this year. North East CILIP organises Mini Umbrella each year and this is another excellent free event. With less money available for training and development anywhere it’s great that there are good free events like this (or fairly cheap ones that I can afford to pay for myself) but it’s definitely worth applying for funding for larger events. Jo’s post for this thing is worth a read for some good tips on applying for funded places at conferences. After missing out on funding for Umbrella this year, I’m keen to try again for funding for future events and conferences.

But first, EndNote. When I was doing my Masters I didn’t use a bibliographic management tool to organise my references. This wasn’t through lack of opportunity, but rather due to bad timing. We had an EndNote training session but by the time this was organised I’d already finished the literature review for my dissertation so carried on just typing in the references manually (I actually don’t really mind doing this and as I always reference as I go along it wasn’t too time-consuming anyway). However, for many students – researchers with thousands of references or just those who hate referencing – EndNote can be invaluable. At work we have just moved to version X4 of EndNote and I really like some of the additional features such as the full text search, which will find the full text of the articles in your EndNote library and attach the pdf to the relevant record, and the facility to import references from a folder of pdf files.

For this thing I decided to take a look at Mendeley. Of course I can’t fully compare a free tool with a commercial product such as EndNote but even so Mendeley stands up quite well against EndNote. It’s fairly straight forward to use and has quite a lot of the same functionality so will be a good alternative to EndNote to recommend to our students. When I have more time I will definitely try out Zotero as it will be useful to know about a few different tools when helping students and this looks like it could be quite a popular one.

I hadn’t had much experience of using Google Docs and Dropbox before trying them out for this thing. Both seem to be really useful tools both for my own use and for recommending to our students, in particular researchers who may be working on projects with colleagues at different institutions. I think I would tend to use Google Docs more for collaborative working for short(ish) term projects and Dropbox more for saving documents to work on anywhere then share files with others who need to view them rather than sending as an email attachment. Dropbox seems ideal for this as files won’t need to be converted from Word (or whatever programme I’ve created them in). Though I have to say after years of working from a memory stick it will be hard to get out of the habit of just saving my work to this. Although I’m constantly telling students to back up their work and not rely on memory sticks, I confess that for my own non-work files, even for Chartership documents, I have not been taking my own advice. I was really impressed with Dropbox and I will definitely be using it in future, even if it’s only as a place to back up my files at first.

I haven’t had a great deal of experience in using Wikis, though from this limited experience I can see that they can be really useful as tools for collaborative working or for knowledge sharing. I have added a link to my Library Roots and Route post to the Library Routes wiki but this is my only real experience of actually contributing to a wiki – though I do intend to contribute to the Library Day in the Life project at some point too. At work we use a wiki as a knowledge sharing tool within our division of the library. However, this was created in-house so lacks some of the functionality of a platform such as PBWorks and acts more as an electronic bulletin board rather than a true wiki. (It’s only really referred to as a wiki because it used to be a PBWorks wiki before the current in-house incarnation). As it is this is a fairly good tool for sharing knowledge – especially as we work on 3 different enquiry desks at 2 different campuses – but if it were developed to function more like a wiki this would be extremely useful and could be expanded to be used across all divisions of the library, improving communication between teams and cutting down on unnecessary service-wide emails.

As a social-professional network Twitter is ideal. It is the most suitable platform for adopting the ‘profersonal’ approach that Jo wrote about in her post for Thing 3. However, I think there is a balance to be found when using Twitter as a professional networking tool. It’s important not to cross the line into being too personal .Tina pointed this out more articulately than I am managing in her post for this thing – well worth a read. As with any written communication, and particularly when limited to a short number of characters where there is no space for explanation, it is important that our words can’t be misinterpreted in a way that may cause offence.

Having said all this, I still really like Twitter. It enables professionals to share knowledge with a large number of peers, more than could ever be possible through face to face interaction alone; it enables collaboration with that network of peers; building an online network on Twitter leads to ‘real life’ networks…the possibilities are endless. As with many things you will benefit more if you contribute more. I feel slightly hypocritical saying this as I’m often reluctant to contribute myself – both through anxiety over having anything valuable to add to a professional conversation and finding it difficult to interact with others if I don’t know them in real life (rather than merely ‘knowing’ them online) – but whenever I have contributed I’ve found my Twitter network to be a group of enthusiastic, friendly and extremely helpful professionals. For me, this shows how  Twitter combines the social and the professional and is one way in which social networking can foster a sense of community.